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NEW MEDIA

Media Decoder’s regular features and other coverage can now be found on the Media & Advertising section front. This change in presentation will provide readers with a single destination for all important and timely media news.

No changes have been made in the reporting, editing and other resources devoted to media coverage. Thank you for reading.

“Shoot the first anti-advertising ad” is the pitch for a contest sponsored by Adblock Plus, the popular software that whites out Web site advertisements. The winning 30- to 90-second video submission, Adblock Plus says, will receive a prize of class time or video equipment worth $5,000 from a film institute in the Philippines.

The contest, at thecreativechallenge.org, is accepting applications until the end of May and is part of a recent conversion of Adblock Plus into a profit-making company with the aim of making online advertising more useful and pleasant, rather than stamping it out entirely.

While many of its estimated 45 million weekly users may treasure the program for its ability to make advertising seem to disappear from the Internet, the people behind Adblock say they recognize that ads keep many publications going.

“I am not against ads in general,” said Till Faida, a managing director of the project, “but I am just annoyed by the current state of ads. I have worked in online marketing — I just thought ads could be so much better.”

While still receiving donations from users, the project now also negotiates deals with large Web sites that run unobtrusive ads to be “white-listed” and thus not automatically blocked by the program. (A recent deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, granted such status to the social news site Reddit.)

The contest, Mr. Faida said, represented an attempt to build out the community of Adblock Plus users. “We are getting more and more designers involved,” he said, stressing that contributions to the project should come from more than just computer programmers.

Considering his own nuanced view of online advertising, Mr. Faida in a telephone interview said that the contest perhaps should not have so clearly been pitched as “anti-advertising.”

“Maybe we should have had a native speaker reading behind us,” said Mr. Faida, who lives in Cologne, Germany.

Wikimedia’s Sue Gardner cited “worry about the broader conditions of a free and open Internet.”Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Sue Gardner, who oversaw a period of rapid growth and evolution of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, said she would step down as executive director of the nonprofit foundation that runs it.

In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Gardner, 45, said she would leave in roughly six months, after the Wikimedia Foundation board had picked a successor.

She said she wanted to advocate more directly on behalf of an open Internet, by starting a nonprofit group, writing a book or joining an advocacy organization.

“Wikipedia will be fine,” she said. “It’s a behemoth, and people love it.”

But, she added, “I worry about the broader conditions of a free and open Internet and the future of other Wikipedia-like projects.”

Ms. Gardner took over the nonprofit foundation that oversees Wikipedia in 2007, a time of intense skepticism about the accuracy of the free online encyclopedia that relies entirely on tens of thousands of volunteers to write and edit entries that now appear in 285 languages.

Ms. Gardner worked to establish relationships with librarians, scholars and grant-making institutions. “At that time people didn’t know what to make of it,” she said of Wikipedia. Today, she added, “Wikipedia is widely acknowledged as useful in a way it wasn’t five or six years ago.”

With credibility came scale. Today, Wikipedia has more than 488 million unique visitors each month, making it the fifth most-visited Web site in the world behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook and ahead of Amazon, Apple and eBay, according to comScore data from January.

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation had total assets of $5.6 million, compared with $49.3 million in total assets in the period from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2012, according to its financial statements.

In 2007 the Wikimedia Foundation, then based in a shopping center in St. Petersburg, Fla., had fewer than 10 employees and raised less than $3 million annually.

Ms. Gardner moved the foundation to San Francisco. It now has roughly 160 paid employees. Its most recent fund-raising drive late last year yielded $25 million to help run Wikipedia from 1.2 million donors.

Ms. Gardner said the “turning point” for her decision to leave Wikimedia came early last year when she oversaw a blackout of Wikipedia to protest two antipiracy bills under consideration in Washington — the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act.

The protests “started me thinking about the shape the Internet was taking and what role I could play in that,” she said.

She also said it was important to leave before Wikimedia suffered from a “founder’s trap,” when a group is too dependent on one personality. When she took over, Wikipedia was still tethered to its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who started it in 2001. “It’s important not to let any organization be overly defined by any single person,” she said. “That’s particularly the case in the Wikipedia movement because it’s a collaborative movement.”

Mr. Wales, a member of the Wikimedia board, said in an e-mail that Ms. Gardner had taken over “at a pivotal time in our movement’s history” and “helped our community build a long and healthy future for Wikipedia.”

Just one year after the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought The New Republic, the magazine confirmed it had fired one of its top editors.

Timothy Noah, a former Slate reporter and senior editor at The New Republic, posted a tweet on Friday afternoon that read, “I just got fired from @tnr. Don’t have a clue why. Anybody got a job?”

Franklin Foer, the magazine’s editor, confirmed through a spokeswoman that Mr. Noah had been fired. He added in a statement “Tim Noah has been a strong voice for liberalism and a rigorous columnist for The New Republic. We’ve appreciated his passion and contribution to the magazine over the past two years and wish him the very best.”

Mr. Hughes, who has spent the last year revamping the near century-old publication, started to reconfigure its masthead last May. He lured back Mr. Foer to replace the magazine’s editor at the time, Richard Just. Since then, Mr. Hughes has been courting new writers to the magazine, including Walter Kirn, the author of “Up in the Air,” and Judith Shulevitz, a former editor of Lingua Franca. In January, Mr. Hughes unveiled a redesign that featured an exclusive interview with President Obama. This week, Mr. Foer said the magazine had passed the 50,000 mark for its circulation, which is a 43 percent jump from the year before.

While Mr. Noah did not respond to a request for comment, his friends on Facebook and Twitter voiced their support. One wrote, “You did nice work there. You’ll do nice work in your next gig. There’s no shame in getting fired. It happens to me all the time.”

Sofia Vergara’s 4.2 million Twitter followers have seen the actress post a consistent stream of photos of her family, her friends and her Modern Family co-stars. Soon, many of those photos and posts will take her Twitter fans to a new Web site called NuevoWorld, which will make its debut on Friday.

The site was created by Luis Balaguer, Ms. Vergara’s business partner and the co-founder of Latin World Entertainment, a Hispanic talent agency and media company the two founded in 1998.

Users who click on Ms. Vergara’s Twitter posts will be directed to her NuevoWorld page instead of to Instagram or Yfrog – popular social media photo sites. Some of the photos will be enabled with technology that allows users to purchase items similar to the ones Ms. Vergara might be wearing.

Other content on the site will include videos and branded content from CoverGirl, Diet Pepsi and Pepsi NEXT, the initial sponsors for the site. NuevoWorld “really puts the relationship between brands and talent on steroids,” Mr. Balaguer said. (Ms. Vergara is also a spokeswoman for each of the products.)

Advertisers will also have traditional display ads on the site, but mostly the brands will focus on creating content, said Shiv Singh, the global head of digital at PepsiCo Beverages. “This isn’t a relationship that’s based ad units and banners, it’s a content relationship,” Mr. Singh said.

Digital ads on the site would be a way for visitors to connect to, say, an video series starring Ms. Vergara. “We see ourselves as a content partner to Nuevo World and not just an advertiser,” Mr. Singh said.

Other Hispanic celebrities that will debut pages on the site include Raúl “El Gordo” De Molina, the host of the Univision entertainment show “El Gordo y La Flaca” and Chiquinquirá Delgado, a co-host on the Univision show “Sábado Gigante.”

LOS ANGELES — Junie Hoang, the actress who sued Amazon and its Internet Movie Database unit for posting her age, can take her complaint — or at least some of it — to a jury.

Judge Marsha J. Pechman, of the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, ruled on Monday that Ms. Hoang, whose legal name is Huong Hoang, could proceed to trial with a breach of contract claim and a request for damages related to her career.

But Judge Pechman excluded Amazon as a defendant, leaving only its IMDb unit in the suit; barred any claim by Ms. Hoang for emotional distress; and granted summary judgment denying a claim that the database had violated the Consumer Protection Act by publishing Ms. Hoang’s age without her consent.

“Anyone who values their privacy and has ever given credit card information to an online company like IMDb or Amazon.com should be concerned about the outcome,” Ms. Hoang said Tuesday in a statement.

In 2011, Ms. Hoang, who is now 41 years old, filed a complaint that said IMDb.com, a widely used film and television database, had illegally used her credit card information to obtain and post her age. The disclosure, she said, exposed her to age discrimination in an industry that values youth — a claim that was bolstered by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which publicly criticized IMDb for posting the ages of performers and others.

In her order on Monday, Judge Pechman described a series of communications in which Ms. Hoang had first omitted her age when subscribing to IMDb, then submitted a false date of birth that made her appear to be seven years younger than her actual age. Eventually, Judge Pechman noted, Ms. Hoang asked IMDb to remove the false birth date, going so far as to submit a fake Texas identification document to show that it was wrong.

Instead of relying on the fake document, the judge said, an IMDb employee gained access to Ms. Hoang’s credit card information, then used that to ascertain her actual 1971 birth date from a public records database called PrivateEye.

Ms. Hoang’s misrepresentations, the judge said, were not sufficient to bar her claim. But whether IMDb had breached its contract with her, or is liable for damages, must be decided at trial, she said.

In an order issued last August, Judge Pechman set the trial date on April 8 of this year.

LOS ANGELES — How fast is YouTube building new media companies? Consider the case of AwesomenessTV, a YouTube-based channel for teenagers.

Last year at this time, Awesomeness had not introduced its MTV-esque programs. Now the channel has about 400,000 subscribers and 80.6 million video views. A Nickelodeon show based on its programming is planned. And on Friday an Awesomeness movie release will open in AMC theaters.

“Mindless Behavior: All Around the World” is a concert film — part singing, part documentary — that focuses on the boy band Mindless Behavior. It will run in about 120 AMC theaters in neighborhoods where, based on data culled from social networks, the group has its strongest fan base.

“It’s an experiment,” said Brian Robbins, the impresario behind AwesomenessTV and a former child star (Eric Mardian on the ABC sitcom “Head of the Class.”)

Mindless Behavior, which toured with Janet Jackson in 2011 and is preparing to release its second album, became part of the AwesomenessTV lineup last summer. Mr. Robbins’s company had the movie idea and agreed to pay for it and handle distribution. He declined to disclose the movie’s budget but said it was “very independent-film sized.” A DVD release is planned.

The Nickelodeon show, meanwhile, is tentatively named “Awesomeness” and will include sketch comedy shown on Mr. Robbins’s fledgling YouTube channel.

Nickelodeon, which has committed to 13 episodes, recently described the show to advertisers as part of an effort to “reinvent sketch comedy for this generation” and to “aggressively pump new talent” into its schedule.

While AwesomenessTV will continue to look for opportunities in traditional media, Mr. Robbins said his company’s primary focus would remain online. “We’re making snack food — the entertainment equivalent of potato chips and Twizzlers and cookies,” he said.

“But as AwesomenessTV is understanding more and more every day,” he added, “snack food is a really enormous business.”

Every couple of days, Ashley Parker and David Carr kick around an episode of “House of Cards.” We are now deep in the story and deconstruct, but if you want to catch up with past chats, you can find episode one, two,three or four in the archives. But be warned that there is a thicket of spoilers there, and in the discussion that follows.

Episode 5

Synopsis: After Frank Underwood and Zoe Barnes consummate the more intimate aspects of their alliance, Zoe decides to leave The Washington Herald and join a nascent political blog. Frank begins to open up doors for his fellow congressman, Peter Russo, that seem to lead either to the gates of hell or the governorship of Pennsylvania. It’s hard to say which.

Carr: Say hello to Slugline, Zoe’s new base of operations for her career. Can we just dwell on that name for a second? Journalists may recognize it as a nod to the term we use for naming stories in our internal system, but most civilians think of it as a slimy snail-like creature that seems to have misplaced its shell and leaves a trail of ooze as it proceeds. That’s not exactly the allusion one might hope for in a publishing enterprise, but the digital economy is rife with examples of things that started out sounding silly — Google and Yahoo come to mind — and end up redolent with meaning.

As Zoe explains it, “Six months from now, Slugline will be what Politico was a year and a half ago.”

Slugline, from what I can tell, is the kind of lovechild that would spring to life if Gawker and Politico hooked up. The editor is constantly on the prowl for “edge” and “grit.” I realized as I was watching that I could never work there even though I like my edge and grit as much as the next reporter. No, the big problem for me is that there is no furniture in the office. I worked at a dotcom Read more…

EverydayHealth.com is adding a familiar face to its roster of medical contributors. On Thursday, the company will announce that Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the chief medical correspondent for CNN and a contributor to “60 Minutes,” will join the site.

Dr. Gupta will contribute articles and videos with a consumer focus for Everyday Health and will also contribute content to the medical professionals’ site, MedPage Today.

“Everyday Health has a very strong and deep bench when it comes to editorial,” Dr. Gupta said. “My strength is in translating some of this stuff into very accessible information for both physicians and consumers.”

For MedPage Today, Dr. Gupta will create The Gupta Guide, which he described as “a digest of what’s happening in the world of medicine and science all over the world on a daily basis.”

Hiring Dr. Gupta was “an easy call” for the company, said Paul Slavin, the company’s chief operating officer, because of Dr. Gupta’s “brand, stature and capabilities.”

“What we’re really looking for is for a combination of Dr. Gupta and Dr. Dad,” Mr. Slavin said, adding that Dr. Gupta would provide information to consumers like whether to give children a flu shot and whether the Mediterranean diet is as virtuous as it sounds.

Other areas Dr. Gupta said he would like to focus on include neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

One of the biggest suppliers of programming for PBS, WGBH, is the latest to climb aboard Amazon’s television pilot process.

Amazon’s production arm said Wednesday that it had ordered a children’s pilot called “Sara Solves It,” which was co-developed by WGBH (the powerhouse public television station in Boston) and Out of the Blue Enterprises, a production company co-founded by Angela Santomero, whose credits include Nickelodeon’s long-running series “Blue’s Clues.”

“Sara Solves It” is the sixth children’s pilot commissioned by Amazon, which is entering the original television space for the first time. Once the pilot episodes are completed, they will be posted on Amazon’s streaming video service, called Prime Instant Video; viewer feedback will play a role in Amazon’s decisions about which become series, and which get shelved.

WBGH and Ms. Santomero’s willingness to sell their show idea to Amazon attests to Amazon’s willingness to invest in original content. Carol Greenwald, the senior executive producer of children’s programs for WGBH, said in a statement, “We are excited to be part of Amazon Studios’ innovative approach of getting high-quality programming directly into the hands of parents and children.”Read more…

It’s report card time for the world’s billionaires and one contender is balking about his grades. But as journalism about the world’s wealthy grows, this billionaire now can take his complaints to a competitor.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal of Saudi Arabia who appeared in the Forbes annual billionaire’s list published this week said that he will no longer cooperate with Forbes on its lists and asked that he no longer be included in the rankings. As a dig to Forbes, he has promised to continue to cooperate with Bloomberg on its far newer billionaire rankings.

After the Forbes rankings were posted online on Monday, the prince announced in a news release that his team has worked with Forbes for the last six years and uncovered what they called “intentional biases and inconsistencies in the Forbes valuation process.” The prince added that “he could no longer participate in a process which resulted in the use of incorrect data and seemed intended to disadvantage Middle Eastern investors and institutions.”

A spokeswoman for Forbes Media noted that the prince has plenty to be pleased about: his ranking rose to 26 for a $20 billion net worth from a ranking of 29 the year before for a net worth of $18 billion. The spokeswoman said it’s just $9.6 billion less than the prince claims he is worth.

On Tuesday morning, Forbes released an article that showed just how long this battle has been simmering between Forbes and its editors. Kerry A. Dolan, who reports on the wealthy and the Forbes billionaire’s list, wrote that Forbes has engaged with the prince over “a quarter century of lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing.” Ms. Dolan added that “of the 1,426 billionaires on our list, not one — not even the vainglorious Donald Trump — goes to greater measure to try to affect his or her ranking.” In one case, the prince grew so upset about a prior ranking that “he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. ‘What do you want?’ he pleaded.”

Ms. Dolan said that Forbes had started to further investigate the prince’s net worth based on the guidance of former employees who noted that, based on fluctuations in his company’s stock price, that he was using the public company to inflate his net worth. In fact, the magazine tracked how the prince’s company’s stock price seems to rise in the ten weeks before Forbes locks in its values for the billionaire’s list.

A Forbes spokeswoman said that it would continue to feature the prince on future lists. Mike Perlis, president and chief executive officer of Forbes, added that the prince had an amicable interview with Steve Forbes before a crowd of several hundred tycoons during the Forbes Global CEO conference in Dubai in October.

But moving forward, the prince announced he would cooperate with Bloomberg on its billionaires list. Bloomberg just started publishing a billionaires’ list last March after Matthew G. Miller, former global wealth editor at Forbes Media, moved there and started tapping into Bloomberg’s 2,400 journalists to contribute. The prince said in a statement that he would continue to work with Bloomberg because they use “a more accurate method of calculating financial holdings.”

The Walt Disney Company will take a significant step toward equalizing the business of advertising on television and online this spring when three of the networks owned by the company, ABC, ABC Family and ESPN, offer advertisers guarantees for video programming distributed both on television and online.

The ABC networks will announce Tuesday that they have adopted the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings system to measure viewing across both television and online sites, and will base all sales on estimates of what total viewing will be on all those platforms.

Traditionally, television networks guarantee advertisers that they will deliver a certain numbers of viewers in specific demographic groups. When viewing falls short of those numbers, the networks provide free commercial time to make up the difference.

But online viewing has lacked a service that could provide similar information for video streamed online. ABC has been aggressively seeking a way to combine guarantees both on television and online. Adam Gerber, vice president of sales development and marketing for ABC, said the company gave combined viewing guarantees to some advertisers in last year’s upfront – the sales period in spring when networks made deals with advertisers for future programming — but expected “a much more robust demand for those kinds of deals” this year.

Michelle Obama may have drawn some criticism, especially in conservative circles, for showing up a week ago to hand out the Best Picture award at the Oscars. But interest in the first lady is surely intense, as proved by the continuing phenomenon of her guest appearance on NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

Mrs. Obama came to New York on the Friday before the Oscars to perform a comedy sketch with Mr. Fallon called “The Evolution of Mom Dancing.” It was an instant hit, picked up and replayed by numerous other television shows.

But the sketch’s real impact can be assessed by its popularity on YouTube. As of Saturday, a video of it had racked up nearly 13.6 million viewings. (It also appeared on numerous other Web sites, including NBC’s.)

Michael Shoemaker, the executive producer of “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” said the appearance by Mrs. Obama grew out of the show’s previous contact with the first lady. She had recruited Mr. Fallon a year ago to take part in a comedy moment to promote the second anniversary of her “Let’s Move” initiative. In that instance, Mr. Fallon traveled to the White House for a recorded sketch in which he competed against the first lady in events like tug of war and a sack race.

Mr. Shoemaker said his show, like all of its competitors in late-night television, had been trying to secure Mrs. Obama for a formal guest appearance since her husband was re-elected. With the third anniversary of the “Let’s Move” initiative approaching, “Late Night” contacted Mrs. Obama. The White House asked what the show had in mind. “Jimmy had done a previous piece about dad dances, and he said maybe we could do one on mom dances,” Mr. Shoemaker said.

“She loved it right away,” he said. “She even suggested some of the dances.”

But the sketch called for a series of synchronized dances performed by Mr. Fallon — dressed in a wig as a mother — and Mrs. Obama. She could not be expected to come to New York for rehearsals. So the show recorded a tape of one of its writers doing the dances and asked Mrs. Obama to learn them.

She showed up on Friday ready to perform. “She did no rehearsal with Jimmy,” Mr. Shoemaker said. “She just came in about 2 o’clock for the taping. She pretty much did it all in one take.”

Among the dances Mrs. Obama worked on enthusiastically with Mr. Fallon: the “Go Shopping, Get Groceries,” the “Driving the Station Wagon,” the “Just the Hands Part of ‘Single Ladies’ ” and “the Dougie.” (Mr. Fallon gave up and let her do that one on her own.)

12:45 p.m. | Updated Add a new health and wellness Web site to the growing number of content portals dedicated to the bilingual, bicultural Latino reader. This site, called Vida Vibrante, will focus on health and wellness issues affecting Latinos.

“There’s a tremendous void in the Hispanic market,” for health resources that are culturally relevant, said Lonnie Jones, the chief executive and founder of the site, who previously worked as national advertising director for a health Web site for African-Americans called BlackDoctor.org.

In order to address the high rates of diabetes among Latinos and how food choices are related to that, for example, “You have to talk about tamales, you have to talk about rice and beans,” Mr. Jones said. A slide show on the site this week, for instance, offers healthy options for Lent, including Mexican chicken enchiladas and Puerto Rican cod stew.

Helen Troncoso, who will contribute to the site, said many people seek content in a “relatable voice.” “Many people are just like me,” Dr. Troncoso wrote in an e-mail. “We are the gatekeepers, who are part of the second generation of Hispanics dealing with our own health struggles, and the struggles within our own families.”

Vida Vibrante, which means Vibrant Life in Spanish, has been available in a stripped-down beta version since October, but will make its official debut Thursday, adding a number of new features. Among them will be a national directory of bilingual doctors, videos, a mobile application and e-mail newsletters. The site will offer visitors the option to read the content in English or Spanish.

“By having a site that’s bilingual, this individual could be talking to their child and at the same time providing information to their abuela,” Mr. Jones said, using the Spanish word for grandmother.

Advertisers on the site will include Optimum Cable and the American Heart Association.

The Copyright Alert System, a program of escalating warnings and prods against people suspected of online copyright infringement, is finally going into effect this week, more than a year and a half after the plan was announced as part of an agreement between the entertainment industry and five major Internet service providers.

The Center for Copyright Information, the organization created to administer the system, announced on Monday that the Internet providers would begin putting it in place “over the course of the next several days,” though it gave no specifics. The Internet companies are AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner Cable.

In the alert system, media companies monitor online traffic through a third party and can complain to Internet providers if a file is downloaded illegally. The suspected violator is then given up to six warnings, some of which carry “educational” messages and must be acknowledged. After the fifth and sixth warnings, the customer’s Internet speed can be slowed to a crawl.Read more…